This study of Góngora’s Soledades is intended to summarize and discuss some of the problems which seemed important for a better understanding of these poems. Special attention is paid to the two opposing ‘camps’ that developed over time; one mainly focussing on the form and the other on the content of Soledades. In this volume the authors tries to integrate the methods and results of both of the ‘camps’.

This study of Góngora's Soledades is intended to summarize and discuss some of the problems which seemed important for a better understanding of these poems. Special attention is paid to the two opposing 'camps' that developed over time; one mainly focussing on the form and the other on the content of Soledades. In this volume the authors tries to integrate the methods and results of both of the 'camps'.

An epic masterpiece of world literature, in a magnificent new translation by one of the most acclaimed translators of our time. A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Góngora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is at once menacing and sublime. In this stunning edition Edith Grossman captures the breathtaking beauty of a work that represents one of the high points of poetic achievement in any language.

Góngora's Soledades, the major lyric poem of the Spanish Baroque. Combining philological rigor with a capacity to engage the most contemporary transatlantic and comparatist concerns, this work situates Luis de Góngora's Soledades within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity. As well as offering an insightful analysis of the Soledades as an expression of the Baroque crisis in all its facets -epistemological, ontological, cultural and historical - the author reads the fragmented lyric subject of Gongorist poetics back against Renaissance precursors [Rojas' Celestina and the poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso] and in anticipation of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. The study concludes with an examination of the interaction between the legacies of Gongorism and French Symbolism in the work of selected poets of the Latin American Vanguard [Gorostiza, Paz and Vallejo]. CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Visiting Assistant Professorof Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Prince of Darkness or Angel of Light? The pastoral masterpiece the Soledades garnered both titles for its author, Luis de Góngora, one of Spain's premier poets. In The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination, Marsha S. Collins focuses on the brilliant seventeenth-century Spanish poet's contentious work of art. The Soledades have sparked controversy since they were first circulated at court in 1612-1614 and continue to do so even now, as Góngora has become for some critics the poster child of postmodernism. These perplexing 2,000-plus line pastoral poems garnered endless debates over the value and meaning of the author's enigmatic, challenging poetry and gave rise to his reputation, causing his very name to become an English term for obscurity. Collins views these controversial poems in a different light, as a literary work that is a product of European court culture.

Traces the processes and paradoxes at work in the late parodic poetry of Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega, illuminating correlations and connections.

Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.